Many of us may claim to have a breadth of knowledge when it comes to romantic comedies, but not many of us can back it up with a PhD. While Chloe Angyal focused on Hollywood romantic comedies for her thesis work, her online writing output goes beyond film and popular culture. As the senior columnist for Feministing, she writes about reproductive rights, politics and gender. I spoke with Chloe about her work online and how often it is that the trolls are the ones who provide the most insight.

What is your background and how did you begin writing online?

The first time I really got excited about writing in public was during my junior year of college when Courtney Martin, a Feministing editor and author came to speak at an event sponsored by the eating disorders awareness and counseling peer group. As I read about her, I discovered Feministing. It was 2008; the feminist blogosphere was a thing, but I had no idea. I was a feminist since I was 15, and I had no idea that this whole vibrant community existed online until I did my due diligence on Courtney. From that day on, Feministing was the front page on my browser, and I read it religiously.

Courtney had a long list of things to say that Princeton students really needed to hear, but the student paper neglected to cover her talk. So I wrote about how I felt about what she said and why young women need to be feminists for the student paper. Then I became a contributing guest columnist to the school paper and occasionally wrote as a guest for Feministing and interned there. It was then that I started my series about romantic comedies, which is really where I found my niche at the intersection of politics, pop culture and gender, and that turned into my doctoral thesis.

Could you talk about your doctoral thesis and why you wrote about that?

My mum raised me as best as she could to be a critical media consumer from a very young age. So I’ve always taken pop culture seriously, which is not to say that I’m immune from its various pernicious and positive effects. When I was looking for things to write about that would get people in the door for feminism, I knew they weren’t going to read women who embody feminism with a capital “f”, like Judith Butler and Audre Lorde, but they might read romantic comedies. It’s a good place to begin. That said, I would like everyone to read Judith Butler and Audre Lorde.

Do you have a favourite romantic comedy?

I have three favourite rom-coms, but with each, favourite has a different meaning. For just pure rom-com for rom-com’s sake, Notting Hill is a favourite. It adheres to the formula really well, and it’s Hugh Grant at his bumbling, floppy-haired finest. In many ways, he is like a manic pixie dream man. He has all these little quirks and he’s sort of aloof and weird, and his hair falls just the right way without him even trying, which is ridiculous.

My favourite rom-com that doesn’t make me want to stab myself in the eyes with a fork is Rashida Jones’s Celeste and Jesse Forever. It’s lovely and genuinely surprising, which doesn’t usually happen to me as someone who has studied the genre, let alone your average viewer. You almost always know how it’s going to end.

And while I don’t like the movie anymore, especially after Lindy West’s masterful takedown, Love Actually is my favorite for how it shows that rom-com audiences are not just limited to women. I remember being in college and finding out that the guys in our friend group hid away in their dorm to watch the movie. They thought we would make fun of them.

My first interaction with them was when they came to campus when I was a senior, and I took their workshop, which was then taught by Courtney Martin. The original mission of The OpEd Project was to change the demographic of voices in America by changing the submission ratio of women to op-ed pages. The reason founder Katie Orenstein picked op-eds is because they are a really great entry point to the marketplace of ideas. It’s very hard to write a book or run for congress or get funding for your organisation, but it’s not that hard to sit down and get your foot in the door of participating in the public sphere by writing an op-ed. The vision has radically expanded because we’re still committed to fixing the gender ratio, which is slowly moving, but now what we’re about is making sure the best ideas no matter where they come from, whether from academia or the non-profit sector, have a chance to be heard. We don’t just work with op-eds any more, we work with all kinds of thought leadership. I still believe in the power of the op-ed to change the trajectory of the public conversation and to influence policy, but to also to radically change an individual’s life. That was Katie’s experience, that was definitely my experience.

What has your experience been writing online?

I do write in print, but only about 10% of my work is in print, so thank you, internet. What has been most interesting to me as I have started putting my ideas out into the world online is that people talk about technology like it is magic – that it can magically transform pre-existing power dynamics and pre-existing hierarchies. But in fact unless you are very deliberate about it, all the internet does is reinforce them. As hopeful as I am, as much potential that I see in the internet for leveling the playing field and the democratisation of media, as much as I have seen some of that, I mostly see the same hierarchies, the same structures being repeated. There is a danger when we talk about technology as magical and transformative, while the hierarchies are being reinforced. I think it gives people the impression that those hierarchies are inevitable and unchangeable and that they’re even natural or desirable. The internet is not a magic wand, and the perception that it is can be dangerous.

Among women, I’m right up at the top of the hierarchy. I’m straight, white, Ivy League-educated, writing in English, and living in the US. I’ve had a lot of opportunities that equally driven and talented and interesting people would not have had. In that way, the reinforcement of that hierarchy has served my career. The other thing is, I don’t get nearly the amount of blowback I would get if I weren’t who I am. I get it pretty bad, and there’s the double whammy of realising that this is really awful and people are saying horrible things to and about me. But this is a good day for a lot of other people – for, say, someone like Zerlina Maxwell. This is a mild response. It’s not only incredibly hurtful on a personal level but I think about everyone who’s not me and doesn’t have the same advantages, who doesn’t have the cultural insulations I have, and it makes me so angry. So when people talk about the internet as this magical disruptive hierarchy thing, I just want to say, “Look at my inbox, look at my friends’ inboxes.”

But I don’t take the responses as representative of anything. I’m a sociologist by training and to me, just looking at the responses I receive online is not good sampling methodology. But I do think these responses can teach you a lot about people’s fears. Understanding what people who disagree with you are afraid of is a really powerful thing. For example, responses to gender issues are often racialised. Seeing those responses has changed the way I write about pop culture and politics. I used to just think about women, and then I used to just think about gender, and now I know that if I can only see the gender angle, I’m not thinking hard enough because it’s never just that. It’s always something else. Trolls teach me things.

You don’t have to be perfect. You can’t be, and you won’t be, so don’t get hung up on trying. There’s a freedom in the knowledge that perfection is not an option. But there’s a responsibility, too: it means that you will make mistakes. And you have to be prepared to screw up in public, and be held accountable in public, and apologise in public, and learn from those mistakes in public. This sounds like a challenge, but it’s actually a gift: it’s a way to be part of the kind of public discourse most of us wish we had, one where people are allowed to be wrong but are held accountable – and hold themselves accountable – when they are. It’s also a challenge, because screwing up can hurt other people and it doesn’t feel great for you, either. But it is also inevitable, and the best thing you can do is learn from it. And other people will learn from it, too: I’ve learned a lot from seeing my role models succeed in public, but I’ve learned far more from watching them learn from their mistakes in public.

What is one fun fact you would like to share with our readers?

I consistently lose at Scrabble to my 100-year-old grandmother. She really likes to play dirty words. That’s not a fun fact about me, but I love my grandmother to bits.